Arctic Plans

Arctic News: Weekly Roundup, October 15–21 It's been an eventful week up north — a major autumn storm hit the region hard, and the government has followed up on the tourism-crime warning we flagged last week with real action. Here's what matters if you're travelling in Finnmark or Troms right now. A major storm swept through the region on Monday An orange-level storm warning covered Finnmark on Monday, with gusts of 27–33 metres per second forecast along exposed coastal stretches — essentially full storm force. Nordkapp was among the hardest-hit areas. The practical fallout was significant: Widerøe cancelled multiple evening flights to Sørkjosen, Hasvik, Hammerfest, Honningsvåg, Mehamn and Vadsø, a SAS departure to Oslo was also cancelled, and Boreal cancelled several ferry sailings, including the Skjervøy–Tromsø express boat. In Troms, the storm brought 50–80mm of rain in 24 hours, flooding roads and basements in places like Sortland, triggering landslide warnings from NVE...

Skjervøy: The Fishing Village That Sent a Legend to Alaska Most places get famous for one thing. Skjervøy , a small island town in North Troms, has somehow collected three — a world-famous dog musher born on its shores, some of the best whale watching anywhere in Norway, and a church old enough to have watched all of it happen. It's still, at heart, a working harbour full of fishing boats rather than a place built for visitors, which is exactly what makes it worth the detour. The boy who became a legend in Alaska In 1877, a fisherman's son was born here named Leonhard Seppala. He emigrated to Alaska chasing gold, and ended up finding something else entirely: a reputation as one of the greatest sled-dog mushers in history. Seppala led the longest and most dangerous leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome — the relay that raced diphtheria antitoxin across Alaska by dog sled to stop an epidemic, later immortalised in the story of Balto and the Iditarod that commemorates it today. His ch...

Arctic News: Weekly Roundup, October 5–11 Trying something new here: a weekly roundup of news from Finnmark and Troms, translated and filtered down to what's actually relevant if you're visiting or planning a trip north. This is a first test edition — let me know what you think. Important: be careful who you book a Northern Lights tour with in Tromsø This is the story we'd most want any visitor to see before booking anything. Norway's financial crime authority (Økokrim) published a national threat assessment this week flagging that criminal networks are establishing themselves in Norwegian tourism, with aurora tourism in Tromsø specifically named as an area of concern. The head of the Tromsø Guide Association says it's "obvious" the city has illegal operators working the Northern Lights trade, and local police confirm they're seeing foreign-run tour operations without proper paperwork. This builds on a pattern authorities have been tracking for over a ...

Svolvær: The Capital of Lofoten Sail toward Svolvær from the open sea, and long before you can make out the harbour or the brightly painted buildings along the quay, you'll spot two narrow rock pillars jutting straight up from the mountain behind the town, split by a gap barely wide enough to see daylight through. This is the Svolværgeita — "the Goat of Svolvær" — and it's as good a way as any to start understanding this place: a working fishing town, un-precious about its own drama, where a genuinely strange natural landmark doubles as a local superstition. Fishermen once climbed the horns to offer up the season's first cod, hoping it would buy them a good catch. These days it's climbers who make the ascent, for the view and for the local tradition of jumping the gap between the two horns — not something to attempt without the right experience and a guide. Svolvær itself, home to around 5,000 people on the island of Austvågøya, is generally considered the un...

Havila Voyages: Sailing the Norwegian Coast from Bergen to Kirkenes and Back There's a particular moment on this journey — somewhere between the third and fourth day, when the towns start getting smaller and the mountains start getting bigger — where it stops feeling like a cruise and starts feeling like something closer to a privilege. You're not on a route built for tourists. You're on a 130-year-old postal and passenger line, still doing the job it was built for, and you just happen to be allowed on board. That distinction is the entire reason a voyage with Havila is worth taking seriously, and having just sailed the Kirkenes–Bergen leg myself, it's worth saying plainly: it was genuinely fantastic — the food, the service and the excursions all delivered well beyond what the price suggests. What this actually is Havila Voyages operates four modern ships — Havila Capella, Castor, Polaris and Pollux — on the classic Norwegian coastal route between Bergen and Kirkenes , ...

Explore The Pasvik Valley There's a particular kind of silence in the Pasvik Valley that visitors keep trying to describe and never quite manage to. It isn't the empty, wind-scoured quiet of the open tundra further west — it's a forest silence, dense and enclosed, the sound of a place that has been left almost entirely alone. That's not an accident of geography. Pasvik is a narrow finger of Norwegian territory squeezed between Russia and Finland, and for most of the last century its remoteness wasn't just a travel inconvenience — it was strategically useful. The result, a hundred years on, is Norway's largest stretch of untouched pine forest, sitting in a valley most visitors to Finnmark have never heard of. Where you actually are The Pasvik Valley — Pasvikdalen — runs roughly 100 km south from Kirkenes along the Pasvik River, which forms the border with Russia for almost its entire length. To the west, across a narrower stretch of land, lies Finland. At the val...

Snowhotel Kirkenes: The Ice Hotel That Never Melts Away Most ice hotels operate on a deadline. They're built fresh each winter, opened for a few months, and then allowed to melt back into the ground come spring — a genuinely spectacular structure that's also, by design, temporary. Snowhotel Kirkenes doesn't work that way. Through a purpose-built cooling system, its ice rooms stay intact 365 days a year, which means you can book a night in a hotel carved entirely from snow and ice in the height of an Arctic summer, with the midnight sun still up outside, just as easily as in the depths of the polar night. That single fact reshapes the whole appeal of the place. It's not a winter-only bucket-list stop — it's a genuine year-round destination, and the "right" time to visit depends entirely on which version of the Arctic you're after. Sleeping inside the ice, any month of the year The hotel's ice rooms — 13 to 14 of them, depending on the season's b...

Mortensnes (Ceavccegeađgi): Walking Through 10,000 Years on a Single Headland Some places wear their history quietly. Mortensnes — Ceavccegeađgi in Northern Sámi — is one of them. It's a low headland jutting into the Varangerfjord, a short drive from the museum at Varangerbotn, and at first glance it looks like exactly what it is: flat, wind-scoured tundra scattered with stones. Walk it slowly, on the marked path, and those stones stop looking random. Some are graves. Some are sacrificial sites. Some are the remains of tent rings pitched by people who stood on this exact ground three thousand years before Rome existed. This single headland holds one of the densest concentrations of archaeological sites anywhere in the Nordic countries, and unlike a lot of ancient sites that require real imagination to picture, Mortensnes lets you walk the actual sequence of human history here, roughly in the order it happened. Why this particular headland The answer is almost entirely practical. Wh...

Travel to Lyngen Lyngen means calm in Norwegian, which is a slightly odd name for a peninsula whose skyline looks like it's trying to pick a fight with the sky. Jagged alpine peaks, some carrying over 140 glaciers between them, rise almost straight out of a fjord that reflects them back so cleanly on a still day that it's genuinely hard to tell where the mountain ends and the water begins. This is the Lyngen Alps, sitting on the Lyngen Peninsula between Tromsø and Alta at roughly 70 degrees north, and it's the kind of landscape that gets photographed constantly and somehow still looks more dramatic in person. Unlike a lot of Arctic Norway's better-known stops, Lyngen isn't built around one headline attraction. It's a whole region — fjord, alps, valleys, a scattering of small villages — and it rewards a few days rather than a quick afternoon detour. Here's how to actually get there, when to go, and what to do once you've arrived. Where it is, and why it ...

The Northern Lights: Where, Why and How Almost everyone who travels to Finnmark or the North of Troms in Norway, is chasing the same thing, whether they say it out loud or not. A night when the sky stops being a sky and starts moving. The aurora borealis is the reason a lot of visitors (and even some locals) put up with sub-zero temperatures and long, dark drives in the first place, and it deserves a proper explanation rather than just a photo gallery — what it actually is, why it happens here specifically, and how to give yourself the best realistic shot at seeing it. What's actually happening up there 🌠 The sun isn't just a ball of light — it constantly throws off a stream of charged particles called the solar wind, and every so often, a solar flare or coronal mass ejection sends a much larger, faster burst of that material toward Earth. Most of it gets deflected by Earth's magnetic field, but the field itself funnels a portion of those particles down toward the two magn...